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Buffalo Jump (2008)

by Howard Shrier(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

030735606X (ISBN13: 9780307356062)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Vintage Canada

series

Jonah Geller

review 1: I really enjoyed reading Buffalo Jump. I like Jonah and I thought this book had a little different story line than most of the current mystery novels and it moved along quite quickly. It took me some time before I figured out what was happening in Buffalo and how it tied into Toronto but eventually it all fell into place. The Toronto setting is fabulous. Howard Shrier makes the city a character in the story every bit as well as Robert Rotenberg does in his Ari Greene series. I particularly like crime mystery novels by Canadian authors especially if they have a Canadian setting.Looking forward to the next in the series "High Chicago", which, as always, I try to read in order, !
review 2: The best words I can come up with to describe this story are: raw, gritty ... moreand intense. While it isn't a great fit for my interests in books, if you like a more aggressive style of murder/suspense story, it may be right for you. If you think you'd like Sam Spade written with a 2000's permissibility of language and plot, this could be your book.Jonah Geller is a private investigator in Toronto who can't seem to stay out of trouble. He's barely recovered from a gunshot wound in the course of his previous case, and now a hit man has shown up in his apartment.Except, he's not there to kill Jonah, but to ask for HIS help. He's been hired to kill an entire family, including a little boy the same age as his own son. He doesn't want to do the job, but the only way out is to find out who ordered the hit and get him to cancel it. But to do that he needs Jonah's help as an investigator.The book is set mostly in Toronto, with some trips over to Buffalo, New York, and initally, I thought I would really enjoy that as books are rarely set in my home city. But because of the subject matter, the Toronto portrayed in this story is a lot dirtier, meaner and more violent than I find it to be in real life. Maybe I just don't see all the grit and rawness that was in the story, or, maybe [hopefully!] the author, Howard Shrier, just amped it up to appropriately fit the story. Either way, it kind of made me sad and depressed to see my city - which I think is just the BEST place anywhere - shown as so angry and violent.I also had trouble with just how raw and gritty the plot was. There is a lot of very graphic violence in this book, and it was a bit too intense for my taste. That's not to say this wasn't a great story, because it was, or it didn't have great, well-written characters, because it absolutely does. I guess I'm just too wimpy for a more masculine approach to murder/action/suspense stories, which is how this book came across to me. But there is plenty of action, and nail-biting suspense.The violence and the crudeness of language, and even the brief sex scenes the book includes were just too aggressive for me. I feel like they were appropriate to the story and right for what the author was trying to do with his plot, so I really don't want to even suggest that this is not a good book - it IS! It just wasn't the right book for my personal sensibilities. less

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